I would listen eagerly to Linda Gregerson reading the ingredient labels on soup cans…
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/slip
Read her poem “Slip,” then listen to her voice. You won’t regret it.
Linda Gregerson on Poem-a-Day
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Monthly Archives: March 2019
N Is Its Child
N Is Its Child
If darkness produces all, from where do we obtain nothing?
As a line becomes the circle, becomes a mouth, becomes identity.
In mathematics, n signifies indefinite; in English, negation.
The no, the non, the withdrawal, the taking away.
A heart with trachea represented zero in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
My mouth forms the void through the displaced word.
Conforming to the absent, the missing tongue serves soundlessness.
Aural reduction, the infinite unclenched: n plus n.
Shiva, creator and destroyer, defines nothingness. As do you.
One and one is two, but zero and zero is stasis.
Pythagoreans believed that all is number, and numbers possess shape.
The letter N evolved from a cobra to its present form.
One may double anything but zero.
Unspoken thought, disorder. The attenuated voice swallowing itself.
* * *
“N Is Its Child” was first published in Issue 4 of Reservoir. I am grateful to editor Caitlin Neely for accepting this piece.
Arthritis
Arthritis
If at night I stray in thought,
dreaming of nimble fingers
and my departed dog’s walk,
will you smile
when I scratch his absent ear
and apologize for the times
I failed him? Even combined,
all the words in these unread books
could never soothe the guilt
of leisure and complacency, nor
match the joy of jumping
for the kicked ball, no matter the
outcome, despite the consequences.
“Arthritis” is included in Indra’s Net: An International Anthology of Poetry in Aid of The Book Bus, and has appeared on the blog as well.
All profits from this anthology published by Bennison Books will go to The Book Bus, a charity which aims to improve child literacy rates in Africa, Asia and South America by providing children with books and the inspiration to read them.
Available at Amazon (UK) and Amazon (US)
Between
Between
1
Living between, we watch what flows below us shed itself.
And what remains after the drought subsides?
I don’t recall the instance of assignation, of color-imprinted
awareness and stones erupting from the earth,
nor the paper’s texture and the faint odor of chemicals reacting,
but in this moment I embrace bitter coffee, the wrecked-nerve
hammer-strikes pulsing from hip to ankle, squealing brakes
and the rain shallowing morning’s ridge as if to say
enjoy me now
for I may never return.
2
Faith flickers in the wind, darting among the weeds.
Risen from payment, penalty, punishment, revenge, the word pain
establishes justification where none need exist.
Interpreting light and sound, scent and heat, we converse.
The dog shivers in bed and I lay a towel over her,
affixing content to involuntary movement.
Stepping through space, crossing the stream.
Those things we don’t know.
Three feet below me the snake’s head ripples towards the far side,
a V of turbulence dissecting the calm.
Everything that can be contained contains us as we in turn
envelop one another. I take your hand and press forward.
3
Connected, we part, only to return and part again.
My hand stopped inches away and the diamondback slithered off
under the workbench, seeking peace.
Abandoned skin, abandoned words. Even the cactus grows thirsty.
The paradox of becoming what you are not. Today, sitting hurts
and standing provides little relief.
In one of two halves I find myself. In the other, your laughter rings.
Like rumblings of earthen discontent or the hiss of air
exiting waterless pipes, we emerge, aimless, exhausted.
Inhabiting one world, we seek others.
* * *
“Between” appeared in Clade Song, one of my favorite poetry journals, in August 2016.
Destined by Gravity to Fail, We Try
Destined by Gravity to Fail, We Try
Having fallen from the roof not once, but twice,
I verify that it is not the fall but the sudden stop that hurts.
The objectivist sense of the little: the and a, my house in this world.
Galileo postulated that gravity accelerates all falling bodies at the same rate.
While their etymologies differ, failure and fall share commonalities,
though terminal velocity is not one.
The distance between the glimpsed and the demonstrated.
Enthralled in the moment, Icarus drowned.
Rumor has it his plunge was due not to melting wax but to an improper mix
of rectrices and remiges: parental failure.
Thrust and lift. Drag. Resistance.
Acknowledgment of form in reality, in things.
When the produced drag force equals the plummeting object’s weight, the
object will cease to accelerate and will move at a constant speed.
To calculate impact force accurately, include the stopping distance in height.
Followed by long periods of silence.
This first appeared on the blog in December 2015.
Biography (Cento)
Biography (Cento)
I am becoming
one of the old
men, but you,
you are earth.
Where is the moment
that lingers,
the static of lost
voices and the feel
of the cleft in the bark.
Ask me anything.
Why am I
grown so cold?
Have you been here?
Thinking
is wind in a cage;
it does not say anything.
* * *
Credits:
James Wright, Cesare Pavese, Ruth Ellen Kocher, HD, Eduardo C. Corral,
Adelaide Crapsey, Denise Levertov, Blaga Dimitrova, Jacques Roubaud,
* * *
A cento is composed of lines from poems by other poets.
For further information and examples of the form, you might peruse the Academy of American Poets site: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-cento
This first appeared here in September 2016.
Interview Up at Vita Brevis
Quote
Brian Geiger, editor of Vita Brevis, an online journal and resource for emerging poets, asked me a few questions…
Poem Up at The Ekphrastic Review
Read Ken Gierke’s double-ekphrastic piece inspired by a painting and a poem.
My ekphrastic poem, “Ageless,” is published today at The Ekphrastic Review. It is inspired by the acrylic on canvas painting “The Eternal Question,” by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner, as well as the poem with which it appeared last year, “Saproxylic,” by Jeff Schwaner. Mary graciously allowed her painting to appear beside my poem.
Editor Lorette C. Luzajic continues to present a wide variety of art and poetry at The Ekphrastic Review, and I thank her for accepting this poem.
To the Lovely Green Beetles Who Carried My Notes into the Afternoon
To the Lovely Green Beetles Who Carried My Notes into the Afternoon
Such beauty should not be bound,
thus I tied loose knots,
knowing you would slip free
and shed my words
as they were meant,
across browned lawns,
just over the cedar fence
or at the curb’s edge,
never to be assembled,
and better for it.
* * *
This appeared in riverSedge Volume 29, Issue 1, released in October 2016, and is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second. I first encountered riverSedge in 1983, and vowed that one day my poetry would be published in this journal. It took a while…
BUY MY BOOK, OR THE CHIHUAHUA GETS
(Pardon the interruption. The book in question is I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes), published by Luminous Press, and available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included. Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.)
…A BELLY RUB!
WHAT? YOU WERE EXPECTING SOMETHING ELSE?
O at the Edges 